Nerd Social. Caught up with Paul Dwerryhouse, Sharkey
and his brother
Nick last night at the Napier, another good geek night out.
Paul still stands as my first recruit to the KDE cause. Pity
that the Dutch have given him so much to think about that he
doesn't really maintain kticker any more, but he seems to be
happier just using Linux rather than developing for it.
kticker is a cool little program, but knewsticker already
seems to have taken over its little niche on the Desktop.
Muzak. Hacking my as-yet-unnamed PyQt hack to Devin
Townsend's latest album Physicist. What a guy. I just go
out
and buy his CDs (SYL I & II, Ocean Machine, Infinity,
Christeen and now this) and I haven't been disappointed with
one. Nobody mixes extremely fast and heavy grooves with
melody like he does - no matter which genre you put him in,
be it prog rock, melodic rock, death, speed or black metal,
the established bands had better
watch out. Of course having Gene Hoglan (after chatting with
him last year, I can see why he's such an aggressive
drummer), Jed and Byron on your side doesn't hurt, and his
production is spot on as usual. Maybe I'll be able to meet
him in Vancouver and give him a big hug for all the hundreds
of hours of sonic happiness he's given me. :)
Unnamed PyQt Project. Wrote a psql-like utility to
use with gadfly in 40 lines. Rip out the command line and
put in a QListView-based query browser - 45 lines. I like
python, I love Qt. Writing a cbb clone is just not a
challenge, I estimate around 200 LOC. I'll implement it and
then aim a little higher. I want to be able to do
expenditure and balance projections, and really take
advantage of the fact that I've got a fullblown SQL engine
built into my app.
Oh my God. I'm doing financial programming again VOLUNTARILY
after promising to myself I'd never do it again after my
stint at AXA. Hmmmm... what's changed? Maybe it's coz I'm
not dealing with actuarial systems guys this time, nor with
that horror C++ Builder. Admitted, it's very very basic as
yet but who knows where this will lead.
I can almost see the actuaries grinning. Welcome, welcome
young man, back to the joys of programming money. Welcome
back to
the fold.
*shudder*
Noted that gadfly doesn't fully implement the current Python
Database API spec. Maybe I can fix some of that and send the
author a patch. Being able to rip out gadfly and plug in
another transactional SQL server is very important to me.